Still, Mayer's reaction to Lenner's snub was telling. His mother and father — a former teacher and a principal, respectively — were painfully unsupportive of his musical ambitions when he was a teenager. "Here's some psychobabble," Mayer says, sighing. "I'm out to impress the mom and dad, all the time." When he was young, Mayer loved being singled out as the only good kid in a group of malefactors: "Like, 'Everybody sucks! But not you, John' or 'Everybody sucks — why can't you be like John?' I'd like to be the 'Why can't you be like John?' of the music industry."
On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in an amphitheater in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, Mayer stands alone onstage, looking out at 23,000 empty seats. Strapping on a Fender Strat, one of more than 200 guitars he owns, he begins his sound check by picking out an uncharacteristically sloppy version of the opening riff from Eric Clapton's "Layla." Discussing his role models at the New York brunch, Mayer says, "It's 'What would Springsteen do?' calculated to my age. And 'What would Clapton do?' Although the answer to that question is 'drugs' at my age. So maybe it's 'What would Clapton do at age sixty-one?'"
Mayer spent a week with Clapton at his estate in the English countryside, where the two wrote a bunch of songs together — which they have no plans yet to release. (Mayer has had similar songwriting sessions with his pal Alicia Keys.) After seeing the kind of cash Clapton throws at cars and vintage watches, Mayer raised the stakes on his own spending — even buying a $134,000 Porsche Turbo S sight unseen, after his mentor told him it was a mandatory rock-star move. "I literally called the Porsche dealer in New York City from Clapton's living room," he recalls. "This thing goes so fast, the front almost comes off the ground." Mayer ended up selling the car, though, after seeing the paraplegics in the documentary Murderball. "I went, 'You know what? I don't need another thing in my life that's gonna possibly take me out.'" Needless to say, Clapton's influence also extends to Mayer's music — the groovy Continuum track "I Don't Trust Myself With Loving You" sounds like the greatest Eighties-era E.C. tune never recorded, complete with an "It's in the Way That You Use It"-style intro. And the rest of Continuum is packed with slow-hand, virtuoso-at-rest guitar leads.
Onstage in Burgettstown, Mayer churns out funky blues riffs on guitar after guitar, all of them Strats — a white one, a black one and his weathered old SRV signature model, bought with money he earned working at a gas station as a teenager. At first it seems like he's just noodling, as if the amphitheater is a giant Guitar Center. But then he calls for his techs to switch out one particular amplifier in his rig, and it becomes clear that he's laboriously working out tones for his set list. "Does this sound spiky to you?" he asks his sound engineer, Chad Franscoviak, of one Strat — which to the uninitiated ear sounds about as good as the other eight guitars he's been playing.
The process takes hours. The sardonic, bespectacled Franscoviak — who is also Mayer's roommate at his house in Los Angeles, where the pair live a scaled-down version of the Entourage lifestyle — says that the scene is a typical example of Mayer's perfectionism. "I think having seen that provides you with a lot of insight into the process of making the [new] record," says Franscoviak. "John hears something in his head, and he won't rest until he achieves it." Mayer's drive extends even to his gaming: Franscoviak doesn't remember ever beating his roomie at their current fave, Rockstar Games' ultrarealistic Table Tennis. "Before that it was Halo, and no one could beat him," Franscoviak says. "That's pretty much his MO if he finds an interest in something — it doesn't matter how incidental it is." Mayer wants to be the best at everything, to have the best of everything — whether it's guitar tones, sneakers, cars, watches, twenty-five-year-old scotch or even sidemen.
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